A TOURING artwork representing the horrors of slavery has come ashore in Coventry.

The Herbert is the last stop on La Bouche Du Roi’s voyage around the country from the British Museum.

Created by Romuald Hazoumé, it’s an installation of 304 plastic petrol can masks arranged in the shape of a slave ship, each representing a person.

La Bouche Du Roi is named after a place in the Republic of Benin, West Africa, where Hazoumé comes from, and from where slaves were transported for hundreds of years.

The exhibition displays a copy of a woodcut created in 1789 which, when viewed from a distance, just looks like an artistic pattern – close up you can see it’s showing the horribly close conditions slaves were transported in.

If you look from the right angle, the petrol cans do look like the horrified faces of people, but it’s the details which add more to the work.

Some are wearing beads which show their dedication to the water goddess Mammy Wata, and red feathers which show they were followers of Xevioso, the maker of thunderstorms.

There are small wooden figures which look like tourist souvenirs but are made when one of a pair of twins dies.

There are representations of the items which the slave ships also carried to use for barter – tobacco, spices, mirrors and cloth.

It’s a powerful installation which has more to it than first appears. But it’s also the reminders of what’s happening in Benin today which are even more thought provoking.

Hazoumé has filmed men transporting petrol illegally in cans of the sort used in his artwork.

They may not technically be slaves, and some apparently make fortunes from it, but others have accidents which blow them to pieces – like some of the broken cans in the artwork, representing those who die on their journey to slavery.